Colored Perlin Particle Field

I was inspired and wanted to play with perlin particle fields, where perlin noise is used to simulate a particle moving along a force field. I found the excellent tool Processing that makes it really easy to play with stuff like this. As luck would have it, someone had already implemented Perlin Particle Fields, but in black and white.

I wanted color. So a few tweaks later and behold! I create particles of 7 different colors and they behave subtly different – they follow subtly different force fields. The force fields are similar enough to be fairly cohesive, but they strive for separation (see the colored “channels” at the bottom left part of the image below).

Movies

Here’s a movie of how a field like the one above is constructed, from the time particles are born until they’ve moved for a couple of thousand updates.

Colored Perlin Particle Field

Cooler movies (?)

But then I found Perlin noise + vectorfield + particles = fun and decided I want to have a go at that too! What he does is run his particles for a set number of iterations, save one (movie)frame, reset with a slightly different Perlin noise field, and then generate a new image – stitching them together to a movie. I’m doing the same below. I randomize the particles using the same random seed, so the particles keep getting spawned in the same locations. Without random spawn points, the movie becomes very chaotic.